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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Fcps cant find a textbook that covers their wonky curriculum so they cherry pick here and there off the internet, have teacher enrichment days, and make kids glue stick ditto sheets into their gigantic spiral notebooks, and the like. 
Math is so jumbled. I wish there was a textbook to give parents an insight of how this stuff is being taught. Apparently, the way we learned long division is not the preferred method - they teach it differently, for example. I couldnt help DS with the long division worksheet bc his teacher had a different approach, which I had never heard of, and it was confusing. And forget Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally (It's GEMDAS now).
Kids learn spelling and vocab through reading and writing. No rote memorization. No writing out the words 10x to learn them, etc. No handy vocab workbook to practice words.
VA history is nothing but worksheets, a few boring guest speakers, and a field trip to the Smithsonian [/quote]

Preach. I totally agree. It’s pathetic![/quote]

DS was struggling in math last year, so his teacher sent home a math textbook to assist his home studies. Now, I have an advanced degree in physics and astronomy, so I know a thing or two about math. Reading the textbook was awful, disjointed, and confusing. Can't imagine how a kid just learning the concepts would benefit from using this textbook. Ended up only using it for extra practice problems.
When DS struggled with spelling and I asked about when they were going to start working on spelling in class, the teacher and principal got rather defensive about it and said that the kids will get plenty of experience spelling when they write and while they read. The olds ways are not effective. I dropped the conversation and started working with DS at home.
I was less than impressed with how they teach history. DS loves history and has more knowledge about it than many adults, including the teacher that was supposed to be teaching him. The teacher joked several times that perhaps DS should teach the class instead of her.
[/quote]

I was homeschooled for a handful of years due to the school districts we lived in at the time. I had parents with advanced degrees in science and math who were definitely there to help, but I was mostly able to teach myself some of middle and high school math using just the Saxon textbooks. They weren't jumbled at all.

We do a phonics + list based spelling program at home with our kids. Word sorting in writer's workshop seems to work for some kids, because there's plenty of beautiful work on display in DC's classroom, but not for DC.

Agree that history curicuulum is ineffective, but threading the needle between history-as-mostly-false-patriotism-indoctrination and history-is-all-bad-except-victims seems incredibly challenging. I say that as someone who is always looking for good history resources for my kids at home. The history textbooks I had as a kid veered horribly from one extreme to the other.[/quote]

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